I also had a guy once showing off his new Apple Watch, showing how he can now switch his lights on/off on the watch and would no longer have to get up to do this. Literally 2 minutes later he showed me how his "Health app" on the watch would remind him every hour to get up from sitting too much, to "improve his health". You just can't make that stuff up.

IoT doesn't offer that kind of growth, though. These are all tightly packaged appliances, their whole raison d'etre is to trick you into a subscription to a cloud service. Unless you're running custom software on DIY IoT connected to Home Assistant, or buying a custom deployment from an old-school home automation company, there's no space to grow here. You aren't going to make your home more ergonomic to use than you could with dumb switches, dumb thermostats, remotes and electric outlet timers. You'll just spend a lot of money and tweak a few trivial settings on an app to get something approximating your needs, and then have half of it stop working whenever your ISP drops your Internet connection for a few minutes; you'll have to replace appliances piece by piece as services backing them thank you for your incredible journey together, and eventually redo your setup/configuration with the next big cycle of upgrades.

So no, I think it's not playing like Feynman's engineers. It's playing like buying very expensive clothes and jewelry - it's paying for status, and has no lasting value beyond what you can make out of your temporary boost in status.

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EDIT: FWIW had my phase of smart lights controlled from a watch - in my case it was Hue lights hooked up to my Pebble. It was more streamlined than you could ever do with Apple Watch, by virtue of Pebble having actual buttons, and control going purely through LAN (Pebble -> Tasker on Android -> Hue Bridge -> Lightbulb). After a week of fun, I realized that most of the time, it's still the second least ergonomic option (the absolute worst was controlling from an app). What I settled on is a combination of dumb switches when on the move (usually faster to reach than even my watch), and a CLI script when near my computer[0].

Also this taught me that the most important component in IoT lights is... smart light switches. Which weren't cheap or easy to get those 6 years ago when I bought my Hue lights, so I had none. With dumb switches, whenever I used them - or my guests used them - they'd screw up the light setup and made bulbs inaccessible over network. I ended up putting a bit of Lisp code on Raspberry Pi, that monitored for lightbulbs that just reappeared on the network, and immediately reconfigured them to a desired state. It's a kind of workaround that you don't get to do if you just buy into neatly packaged, cloud-powered IoT appliances.

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[0] - https://github.com/TeMPOraL/hju

My apartment is a patchwork quilt of perpetually out of date devices each with their own utterly garbage app (or underwhelming homekit integration, or arcane homeassistant yaml incantation if I’m feeling really optimistic).

Various devices and integrations work poorly together if at all, the hubs are updated and old devices are left behind, a failed lightbulb update seemingly bricks it, but an hour of fiddling returns it from the dead, but now it still shows up in various apps under the wrong name and can’t be purged. Siri doesn’t know how to set color temperatures and bulbs look slightly weird depending on who set them with what integration.

My $700 air conditioner forgets about the wifi after being on standby for 24 hours and can’t be activated remotely when coming home from a weekend away. I have multiple wireless hifi dongles because they only work properly with certain devices. Some devices are MIA for minutes at a time despite strong wifi throughout my very modestly sized apartment.

I own smart home products from several brands and have spent hours configuring and/or debugging these things. I am over it. Very few things I have bought have lived up to their promise.

I’m so glad I avoided getting a smart TV the last time I was on the market. My parents smart Samsung is just a few years old, but, as I learned on my last visit, is no longer supported for many of the current streaming apps, so they need a new streaming device to plug into it!

I think a dumb TV with an external device is always better and hit this same path with relatives. The normal TV companies have no incentive to keep people happy for years with a dumb TV, so I use a laptop for TV and would only upgrade to a video projector.

We have "smart" TV that has never been and never will be connected to the Internet with an AppleTV connected over HDMI. Works well and when it's time to upgrade - which we are in no hurry to do - just the little box needs replacing. Unfortunately at some point the TV will fail, because things do, and then I doubt we will be able to buy one without its own dedicated 5G connection just for "telemetry" back to the manufacturer.

Good news, we've had motion detecting light switches for decades.

Time spent just configuring a pre-built system, that, in my opinion, is time wasted because it isn't likely that I can apply it to anything else.

I didn’t go into detail, but smart home appliances have more variability than I described. Let’s take lights. If you want to play a movie on the TV you can turn your lights off (all of them) from the couch. If you’re listening to music, you can set the lights to a warm relaxing glow. So on and so forth. Definitely more than 2 seconds saved, and in the end, it wasn’t just the time saved but the added convenience and personalization that was worth it for me.

Sure, you can do most of these things with “dumb” appliances, but that’s just it. You won’t get the same level of control, personalization, adaptability, or “smarts” - if any of that matters to you.

I could live without it (and currently am, due to an apartment move), but it was certainly handy.

Not used as much, but turning on the A/C before arriving home from a long trip sure is nice. That obviously requires the internet, but I refuse to use a third party.

Downsides - 2 dead smart switches in 2 weeks. They aren't cheap and should last a lot longer.

The same goes for hvac. Configuration might be more complicated but I'd rather walk into a sweltering home than have a massive power bill when some script kid pwns my system and sets the temp to 50f for two weeks.

Humor aside, I'm still interested in what you are referring to. I'm not aware of a way to do that, but maybe didn't know what to look for.

I was interested in a thermostat with an API that worked locally, no internet needed and no 3rd party required and that is what I went with. Paired with the alarm system (old school, hard wired, it doesn't know what the internet is) it can alert me when the A/C is on, but a window is open.

A 7 day may not be sufficient for an 8 day trip unless you can have a friend or family member drop by to adjust the settings, but I'm definitely going to keep this in the back of my head for when I inevitably need to upgrade my HVAC.

The automated lights and blinds in the morning, for example, can for some improve sleep quality compared to a standard alarm. Then again this would probably be better as dumb blinds and lights on timers.

I have a few smart switches that I can't say are anything more than convenience, but one smart plug paid for itself in 7 months and now saves me a whooping $4 per month on propane. A dumb timer would almost work, but the smart plug makes it so I can handle the exceptions to the rule.

I don't have AC. If I turn off the heat, my pipes will burst. I can't see a reason to turn lights or fridges on/off when I'm not there.

> just don't say silly things like "automation, lame!"

I didn't. I said I honestly can't see the utility in any of it.

For many people (including me), manually adjusting AC and lights or getting up to check the door simply isn't enough of a pain point to create interest in smart devices.